May 2, 2012

Second day reactions to Nets branding: the "borough is the message" and "going the nostalgic route with something that has little actual heritage"

Atlantic Yards Report

Norman Oder rounds up more opinions about the Brooklyn Nets branding scheme.

I'm catching up on some second-day coverage of the Brooklyn Nets branding rollout Monday, April 30.

In Day One of the Brooklyn Nets Went Well, New York magazine's Will Leitch noted the "friendly little coincidence" that the team's brand identity launch "happened to coincide with one of the worst Knicks days in recent memory."

He noted, as I should have stressed, that the line outside Modell's was driven not merely by excitement about new logos and merch but by the giveaway of 100 free tickets to the home opener.

Leitch agrees that the simple fact of "Brooklyn"--as with the Brooklyn Cyclones--means people will wear the merch. He adds:

The problem, of course, is that you only get to do this once. We enjoyed the "No Sleep Till ... " and "Brownstone Ballers" T-shirts, and we enjoyed the "shoes hanging off a telephone pole" motif, along with the general good vibe, 'cause hey, how couldn't you? (Whatever your issues with Bruce Ratner and the nefarious ways this project was put together are, there is something viscerally exciting about having a basketball team in Brooklyn, at a base level.) But the Nets' plan, considering how bad the team is and how unlikely they are to sign Dwight Howard or keep Deron Williams, is to simply sell Brooklyn itself; the borough is the message.

And, he warns:

And the Nets only get to sell Brooklyn for so long; eventually they have to sell themselves. Right now, they're not close to that.